The Queer Italia Network, sponsored by the AHRC, aims to build an international network of scholars, activists, cultural practitioners, and artists who engage meaningfully with queer sexualities, cultures, scholarship, and politics in Italy, and establish dialogues and collaborations between academics and those working outside of academia.
Ruthless Gravity by Senith, who performs BadAssolo at our second workshop - Photograph by Little Franz
The Queer Italia Network will focus on issues of critical theory and practice, with a view to developing innovative theoretical approaches to queer questions. Particular attention will be paid to: the 'domestication' and deployment of Anglophone queer theories in the Italian context. It will also ask participants to reflect in depth on the key issues of language, interdisciplinarity, representation, performance, politics, identity and migration across various platforms, and to develop collaborative projects around these themes.
The network brings together researchers, including early-career and emerging scholars, from the fields of literature, sociology, philosophy, performance studies, history of art, media studies, linguistics, history, translation studies. It also includes artists and activists working outside the academy. It therefore creates spaces in which different stakeholders can share their work, ideas and concerns in order to create significant research outputs and to develop future individual and collaborative projects, whether academic, artistic or activist.
Project team
- Dr Charlotte Ross, University of Birmingham (PI)
- Dr Julia Heim (Researcher, CUNY)
- SA Smythe (Researcher, UCLA Santa Cruz)
External resources
Outcomes
Key events include five workshops, and a panel at a high-profile international conference:
- Workshop 1: Queer(ing) Anglo/Italian Theories and Practices (26-27 April 2016, University of Verona)
- Workshop 2: Translating Queer Historicities (23-24 June 2017, IMLR London)
- Workshop 3: Queer Transnational Arts & Activism (13-14 July 2017, University of Eastern Piedmont, Vercelli)
- Workshop 4: LGBTQIA Representations and Italian Media (CUNY graduate centre and the Casa Italiana, New York)
- Workshop 5: Migrations: Intersectionality, Queerness, Diaspora (18-19 January, University of Naples)
- Conference: Panel session at the American Association of Italian Studies conference (May 2018)
Key publications will include: peer reviewed journal articles, a special issue of a leading peer-reviewed open access journal.
